Ken Langone, the billionaire founder of Home Depot, is worried Pope
Francis’ recent criticism of the wealthy and capitalism will be a
“hurdle” for rich donors.

Langone is heading up an effort to raise $180 million for the restoration of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and told
CNBC that at at least one potential seven-figure donor was “concerned”
about the Pope’s remarks. He’s apparently brought the issue up more than
once with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York: “I’ve told
the cardinal, ‘Your Eminence, this is one more hurdle I hope we don’t
have to deal with. You want to be careful about generalities. Rich
people in one country don’t act the same as rich people in another
country,’” Langone said, adding that “you get more with honey than with
vinegar.”

Neither Langone nor Dolan, who appeared on the network separately,
revealed the identity of the donor in question.The statements that have
them worried came fromEvangelii Gaudium, the first major written statement of Francis’ papacy:

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories
which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will
inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness
in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts,
expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding
economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic
system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a
lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that
selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost
without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling
compassion at the outcry of the poor…

Dolan said
he assured Langone that “the pope loves poor people” and “also loves
rich people,” and that the donor had misunderstood Francis’ message.
Langone himself suggested
the pope’s view of capitalism has been skewed by his experiences in
Argentina, arguing there’s a “vast difference” between that experience
“and how we are in America.”

But this misses the point. As Elizabeth Stoker points out,
the Pope’s point is fundamentally theological, not political, and thus
policy differences between capitalism in Argentina and in American are
irrelevant. Blind defense of free market capitalism “compromises
fellowship between people by perpetuating the wedge of inequality” — and
as of 2011, the United States was even more economically unequal than Egypt.

The idea that possessing significant wealth inherently makes it
harder to behave morally is a bedrock part of Christian ethical thought.
In a well-known passage from the New Testament,
a rich man asks Christ what he must do to fully follow God’s law. When
Christ responds “sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor,”
the man walks away dejected, prompting Christ to observe that “it is
easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone
who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Five years after wrecking our economy, the big banks are back. Here's why we need real government regulations

September 15 marked five years since the beginning of the economic
slump that defines the world we live in. Disaster was in the air already
by that day in 2008: real-estate values had been falling for some time,
Bear Stearns and several big commercial banks had failed, and the
government had taken over the mortgage insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac the previous week. But that Monday morning in September was when the
larger economy went over a cliff — after Lehman Brothers, the nation’s
fourth largest investment bank, finally succumbed to the effects of the
noxious securities on which it had gorged itself for years.

Later
that day, in a climate of almost complete panic, Merrill Lynch — the
nation’s third-largest investment bank, which had fed at the same
trough — managed to find shelter in the arms of Bank of America. By the
next day, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department announced that
they were saving AIG, the mammoth insurance company that had
transformed itself into a stealth hedge fund. As for actual hedge
funds, more than 700 of them collapsed in the subsequent four months.
And Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two investment-banking
leviathans, desperately registered themselves as “bank holding
companies” and threw themselves upon the mercy of the all-forgiving Fed.

It
was the unavoidable explosion after decades of deregulation and willful
blindness. A kind of waste product had been deliberately moved through
the bowels of a hundred shady mortgage outfits. It was then gilded by
delusional ratings agencies and sold to the world by the most respected
names in finance. Bribery and deceit and crazy incentives had been the
laxatives that pushed this product down the pipe; money and bonhomie and
reassuring economic theory had been the sedatives that put the
regulators to sleep.

The industry would supervise itself, we were
told — and we believed it. Instead our economic order turned out to be
wobbly, even rotten. The great banks looked insolvent. The great
capitalists looked like criminals.

Then came a second outrage to
rival the first. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who had been
effectively promoted to king by a frantic George W. Bush, demanded and
received $700 billion from Congress to resuscitate the banks run by his
former colleagues on Wall Street. There was a class of businesses, we
learned, that could not be allowed to fail, no matter what kinds of
suicide missions they undertook; and there was a class of people who
could not be held responsible for their deeds, no matter how they
beggared the world or deceived their marks. That this class’s chosen
public persona was one of churlish, sniggering contempt for the
non-crooks who were now required to rescue them only compounded the
shock.

What
if you cut all benefits? What if all of public life were a giant
competition? What libertarianism would look like in real life.

These four libertarian/conservative dystopias are offered, as Rod
Serling used to say in "The Twilight Zone," "for your consideration."

The “Libertarian/Conservative”

I’ve qualified my previous writings on libertarianism with
disclaimers explaining that I’m addressing a specific, popular subset of
libertarian thought. But I’ve still run afoul of dozens of people who
say, “I’m a libertarian and I don’t think those things.” I’ve still
received comments like those from David Brin, who correctly notes that I’m not addressing libertarians like Friedrich Hayek in my criticism.

True. But Hayek ain’t in the saddle these days. Ayn Rand is
leading the posse, to the extent any intellectual figure is. But I'll
put my disclaimer upfront this time: I acknowledge that, as
libertarian-friendly writer John Danaher puts it, “’libertarianism’ has come to denote a broad, often fractious, group of political theories.”

I suppose it’s only fitting that a philosophy celebrating
competing markets would, to a certain extent, be a set of competing
markets itself.

But it seems even clearer that a “libertarian” in today’s
political environment is almost always someone who ascribes to certain
core philosophies: He abhors government, hates taxation, and is hostile
to collective action on behalf of the less fortunate. Name any prominent
modern libertarian—Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Ron Paul, Peter Thiel, Rand
Paul—and they are likely to fit this description.

These figures represent a singular and increasingly
dominant libertarian vision. To avoid future confusion, I'll give their
brand of thought an admittedly imperfect name:
“libertarian/conservative.” It is that vision, and their future, which I
address here—and it's a frightening future.

1. What if you cut all benefits?

You’ve heard it from Sen. Rand Paul and other conservatives
this winter: unemployment benefits increase unemployment. It’s an
enormously destructive idea, though absurd on its face. It's like the
argument that hospitals create sick people; after all, there are so many
of them there.

When it comes to the world economy, what you "see" is not usually
what you get - especially when it comes to gender. Capitalism has fueled
a world in which women are rendered invisible and saddled with the
majority of labor. They are responsible for two-thirds of all working
hours, produce 50 percent to 90 percent of the world's food and 100 percent of the world's children. Yet, for all this, they receive only 10 percent of the world's income and own less than 1 percent of the world's property. As a result, women make up 70 percent of the world's poor.

Moreover, gender violence is more of a threat to women's health than
the sum of traffic accidents and malaria. Often, when women are "seen,"
they are seen as simply bodies, to be manipulated in ways that lead to
profit. In a very real sense, as people, women are invisible.

Stephen Lewis, the former UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, wrote in his 2006 book, Race Against Time,
that the World Bank, the UN and other international organizations
repeatedly emphasize the need for greater and more effective action to
counter gender inequality to achieve sustainability and other economic
goals - but continue to work contrary to that type of action. Lewis
wrote, "There is no greater emblem of international hypocrisy than the
promise of women's rights."

More recently, Elizabeth Arend, programs coordinator at Gender Action, has documented the "alarming gap"
between the World Bank's "rhetoric and reality." Apart from ignoring
issues of unequal access to land, credit, technical inputs, education,
decision-making power and the extra demands of child care and other
domestic commitments, "the bank's declining support for rural
agriculture disproportionately harms poor women, who constitute the
majority of small-scale farmers and play a critical role in growing,
processing and preparing food." Continue reading at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/20849-capitalism-ecology-and-the-official-invisibility-of-women

While church leaders have for years challenged the Republican Party
on some social issues, including the death penalty and immigration,
conservatives have generally marginalized their concerns as
insignificant or irrelevant.

But the new pontiff has attracted too much attention with his call to
focus less on divisive social issues and more on helping the poor and
vulnerable.

Pope
Francis has drawn sharp criticism from the hugely influential Rush
Limbaugh and other conservatives for his remarks on the unrestrained
free market and “trickle-down” economics, which he dismissed naïve and
unsupported by the facts Limbaugh branded those statements as “pure Marxism,” but Sarah Palin
was less harsh, admitting only that the pope’s statements sounded
liberal to her, and her former 2008 running mate offered mixed reviews.

“His economic perspective I’m not particularly enamored with, but his
advocacy for the poor, his lifestyle example, his more modern outlook
on social issues — I’ve been very impressed,” said Sen. John McCain
(R-AZ).

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) attended Catholic school as a youngster and
graduated from Notre Dame’s law school, said he found the pope’s
reference to “trickle-down economic” demeaning and off-putting, but he
said the pontiff’s message should be considered in context.

Low wages, low or no savings, and low Social Security benefits. The future is not bright, especially for women and minorities.

(Editor’s note: This AlterNet interview is part of our expanded
focus on modernizing Social Security, which, to us means increasing
benefits where needed and ensuring its long-term funding. Dr. Maya
Rockeymoore is a longtime advocate for racial justice. She is chair of
the National Committee to Protect Social Security and Medicare and president and CEO of Global Policy Solutions. She spoke to AlterNet’s Steven Rosenfeld about how America’s retirement crisis affects communties of color and women.)

AlterNet: There’s a lot about America’s growing
retirement security crisis that’s not fully appreciated by the public,
especially when it comes to the harmful impacts on communities of color
and women. Tell us how unless we as a country have an honest discussion
about this, and expand Social Security, that tens of millions of people
will literally slide into poverty as they age.

Maya Rockeymoore: There is no way we cannot have
this discussion given the nation’s changing demographics. The rising
majority will be primarily Asian-American, African-American and
Latino-American. The fact of the matter is those people are already
here. Of all the babies born today, a majority are children of color. By
2019, a majority of all children under the age of 18 will be from these
racial and ethnic, quote-unquote, minority groups. And by the by 2043,
the nation will be majority minority.

The benefit cuts that austerity proponents are talking about today
will be fully shouldered, if they ever were to pass, by a nation that
looks very different than it does today. And so when you’re talking
about cutting Social Security now, most proposals are not talking about
cutting it for current retirees. They’re talking about implementing
changes that would affect today’s youth. You should understand that you
are primarily cutting benefits for a generation of young people who the
odds are stacked against them having any type of retirement security.

AlterNet: And that’s on top of what’s shaping up as a retirement crisis for baby boomers.

Maya Rockeymoore: We’re already a nation
experiencing a retirement crisis. The private sector mostly does not
have defined benefit pensions anymore. And 401Ks have been a failure.
What many people fail to appreciate is that communities of color have
less access to retirement savings vehicles on the job than do white
Americans. And unfortunately, even when they do have access, they are
either more likely not to take advantage of it, or more likely to take
loans out of it. So what we have is a population, that by virtue of
their inconsistent relationship with the labor market, which is rooted
in historical inequities, are already disadvantaged when it comes to
retirement security.

With poverty on the rise in the late 1970s, Reagan conservatives waged war on the needy — and won

After
the mid-1970s progress against poverty stalled. The 1973 oil crisis
ushered in an era of growing inequality interrupted only briefly by the
years of prosperity during the 1990s. Productivity increased, but, for
the first time in American history, its gains were not shared by
ordinary workers, whose real incomes declined even as the wealth of the
rich soared. Poverty concentrated as never before in inner city
districts scarred by chronic joblessness and racial segregation. America
led western democracies in the proportion of its children living in
poverty. It led the world in rates of incarceration. Trade union
membership plummeted under an assault by big business abetted by the
federal government. Policy responded by allowing the real value of the
minimum wage, welfare benefits, and other social protections to erode.
The dominant interpretation of America’s troubles blamed the War on
Poverty and Great Society and constructed a rationale for responding to
misery by retrenching on social spending. A bipartisan consensus emerged
for solving the nation’s social and economic problems through a war on
dependence, the devolution of authority, and the redesign of public
policy along market models.

Urban Transformation

The
years after the mid-1970s witnessed a confrontation between massive
urban structural transformation and rightward moving social policy that
registered in a reconfigured and intensified American poverty in the
nation’s cities. It is no easy task to define an American city in the
early twenty-first century. Fast-growing cities in the post-war Sun Belt
differ dramatically from the old cities of the Northeast and Midwest as
any drive through, for example, Los Angeles and Philadelphia makes
clear. Nonetheless, all the nation’s central cities and their
surrounding metropolitan areas experienced transformations of economy,
demography, and space that resulted in urban forms without precedent in
history. These transformations hold profound implications for poverty as
both fact and idea, and they underscore the need to understand poverty
as a problem of place as well as persons. A long tradition of social
criticism—from nineteenth-century advocates of slum clearance through
the “Chicago school” of the 1920s to the most cutting-edge urban theory
of the twenty-first century—presents poverty as a problem of place. In
one version, which has dominated discussions, conditions in places—most
notably, substandard housing—produce, reinforce, or augment poverty. In
an alternate version, poverty is a product of place itself, reproduced
independent of the individuals who pass through it. Both versions help
explain the link between poverty and the multisided transformation of
metropolitan America.

The first transformation was economic: the death of the great industrial
city that flourished from the late nineteenth century until the end of
World War II. The decimation of manufacturing evident in Rust Belt
cities resulted from both the growth of foreign industries, notably
electronics and automobiles, and the corporate search for cheaper labor.
Cities with economic sectors other than manufacturing (such as banking,
commerce, medicine, government, and education) withstood
deindustrialization most successfully. Those with no alternatives
collapsed, while others struggled with mixed success. Some cities such
as Las Vegas built economies on entertainment, hospitality, and
retirement. With manufacturing withered, anchor institutions, “eds and
meds,” increasingly sustained the economies of cities lucky enough to
house them; they became, in fact, the principal employers. In the late
twentieth century, in the nation’s twenty largest cities, “eds and meds”
provided almost 35 percent of jobs. As services replaced manufacturing
everywhere, office towers emerged as the late twentieth century’s urban
factories. Services include a huge array of activities and jobs, from
the production of financial services to restaurants, from high paid
professional work to unskilled jobs delivering pizza or cleaning
offices. Reflecting this division, economic inequality within cities
increased, accentuating both wealth and poverty.

Warren stands up to a project that could enrich the Koch brothers by tens of billions.

On Friday, December 20, Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren
finally separated herself clearly from former U.S. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, regarding the issue of climate change and global
warming.

TransCanada Corporation wants to build the Keystone XL Pipeline to
carry oil from Alberta Canada's tar sands to two refineries owned by
Koch Industries near the Texas Gulf Coast, for export to Europe. Hillary
Clinton has helped to make that happen, while Elizabeth Warren has now
taken the opposite side.

Secretary of State Clinton, whose friend and former staffer Paul
Elliot is a lobbyist for TransCanada, had worked behind the scenes to
ease the way for commercial exploitation of this, the world's
highest-carbon-emitting oil, 53% of which is owned by America's Koch brothers.
(Koch Industries owns 63% of the tar sands, and the Koch brothers own
86% of Koch Industries; Elaine Marshall, who is the widow of the son of
the deceased Koch partner J. Howard Marshall, owns the remaining 14% of
Koch Industries.)

David Goldwyn, who was former Secretary Clinton's Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs, is yet another lobbyist for TransCanada. So,
TransCanada has two of Hillary Clinton's friends working for it. Elliot
and Goldwyn worked with Clinton's people to guide them on selecting a
petroleum industry contractor (not an environmental firm or governmental
agency) to prepare the required environmental impact statement for the
proposed pipeline.

Secretary Clinton's State Department allowed the environmental impact
statement on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline to be performed by a
petroleum industry contractor that was chosen by the company that was
proposing to build and own the pipeline, TransCanada. That contractor
had no climatologist, and the resulting report failed even at its basic
job of estimating the number of degrees by which the Earth's climate
would be additionally heated if the pipeline is built and operated. Its
report ignored that question and instead evaluated the impact that climate change would have on the pipeline, which was estimated to be none.

It's Christmas Eve in the Digital Age, but for those concerned about
the growing amount of screen time that teenagers and young children—even
infants—are now experiencing, the holiday gift-giving season may become
an increasingly "horrifying" affair.

As the rise of technology dovetails with the multi-billion dollar toy
and media industries, children are now growing up in a digital
environment that may seem harmless to some but could be dramatically
harming key components of their physical, mental and emotional growth at
one of the most precious and fragile stages of human development.

A recent survey of 1,000 parents with children between 2 and 10 found
that more than half planned to buy a tech item for their children this
holiday season. About two-thirds of those planned to give a tablet or
smartphone, according to the survey, which was taken for PBS Kids, the
brand of the public broadcasting network aimed at young children.“Smarter Giving With Apps!” shouted the December cover of Manhattan
Family, a monthly publication geared to families with young children.
The article, written by a kindergarten teacher, noted that “traditional
gifts, like clothes and toys” can be costly “and not always what
children are wishing for.” Apps, on the other hand, she wrote, are
cost-effective, educational and fun — the perfect gift.

But are they the perfect gift? Hardly, say experts.

In fact, child development researchers and doctors are increasingly
alarmed by the growing amount of screen time that children—especially
those under the age of two—are receiving or being allowed.

In October, as Common Dreams reported, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued an updated version of their media usage guidelines
for young children and warned parents that adolescents should have no
more than 1 to 2 hours of screen time per day and that children under
the age of two should have none whatsoever.

PHOENIXVILLE, Pa. -- Charlie Walker was working from home one day
last January when he got a call from his manager, who had already
assembled several other senior employees in his office. "I can't remember exactly how he said it -- change of business
conditions or whatever else -- long story short: you're out of here,"
Walker, 55, said in an interview. He'd worked for the
business-to-business publisher for 11 years. "Everyone else was in the
office because they were able to pull them in. I got laid off by phone."

He didn't know how to react. His 6-year-old daughter, Emmalee, had
been playing with dolls on the floor of their two-story home in this
Philadelphia suburb while her father got fired.

"I hang up the phone and I look at her and say -- she doesn't know
these things -- and I said, 'I just lost my job,'" he said. He
immediately wished he hadn't burdened his daughter.

The next thing he did was call his wife, Andrea, so they could begin
downscaling their lifestyle. No more restaurants, no new winter coat, no
more zero balance on the credit cards. Since then, between her job with
a local government agency that serves senior citizens and his roughly
$300 per week in unemployment benefits, they've been able to juggle
their expenses.

"The unemployment wasn't that much, but it made the difference," Andrea Walker said. The benefits are at an end. Congress skipped town for the holidays
without reauthorizing federal unemployment insurance, which is available
to workers after they use up the usual six months of benefits provided
by states -- which Charlie Walker has done. Next Saturday, he will be
among more than 1 million workers whose federal benefits prematurely
expire.

The Christian right works hard to craft theological arguments to support corporate policies.

The classic understanding of the relationship between
social and economic conservatives is simple: Social conservatives are
often understood as dupes who let their obsession with controlling other
people’s sex lives convince them to vote Republican, often against
their own economic interest. This was what President Obama was getting at when he said that working-class whites who vote Republican “cling to guns or religion.”

There’s some truth to that, but if you start to dig a
little deeper, it turns out that the Christian right doesn’t just bait
believers into voting against their economic interests. On the contrary,
the Christian right works fairly hard at trying to create theological
arguments to support economic policies Republicans champion, such as
slashing the social safety net or allowing unfettered capitalism to
rapidly expand income inequality and environmental damage.

Here are the various ways Christian right leaders glaze
over the Jesus of the Bible and push their followers to worship one who
looks a little more like a Nazarene Ayn Rand.

1) Arguing that Jesus was a capitalist. By
and large, the “loaves and fishes” man portrayed in the New Testament
can in no honest way be reconciled with the aggressively capitalist
attitude of modern Republicans, which holds that profit should never be
constrained by concerns such as human rights and basic dignity for all.
So conservatives are usually just elusive on the subject. However , Pope Francis’s recent comments regarding the excesses of capitalism have created some pushback on the right.

The favorite argument is that the Pope just doesn’t
understand Christianity, which is totally pro-capitalist, no matter how
excessive it gets. Ramesh Ponnuru blithely suggested
that the Pope’s remarks show that the Pope just doesn’t understand
“markets could instead enable a creative form of community” and that
more “evangelizing still needs to be done” to convince the Pope that
real Christians should embrace capitalism. Never mind that Pope Francis
is from Argentina, where the “creative form of community” brought on by
an eagerly capitalist, anti-socialist government was expressed through
the creative disappearance of people whose left-wing politics were a threat to the capitalist community.

Industry expert warns of grim future of 'recession' driven 'resource wars' at University College London lecture

A former British Petroleum (BP) geologist has warned that the age of cheap oil is long gone, bringing with it the danger of "continuous recession" and increased risk of conflict and hunger.

At a lecture on 'Geohazards' earlier this month as part of the postgraduate Natural Hazards for Insurers course
at University College London (UCL), Dr. Richard G. Miller, who worked
for BP from 1985 before retiring in 2008, said that official data from
the International Energy
Agency (IEA), US Energy Information Administration (EIA), International
Monetary Fund (IMF), among other sources, showed that conventional oil
had most likely peaked around 2008.

Dr. Miller critiqued the
official industry line that global reserves will last 53 years at
current rates of consumption, pointing out that "peaking is the result
of declining production rates, not declining reserves." Despite new
discoveries and increasing reliance on unconventional oil and gas, 37
countries are already post-peak, and global oil production is declining
at about 4.1% per year, or 3.5 million barrels a day (b/d) per year:

"We
need new production equal to a new Saudi Arabia every 3 to 4 years to
maintain and grow supply... New discoveries have not matched consumption
since 1986. We are drawing down on our reserves, even though reserves
are apparently climbing every year. Reserves are growing due to better
technology in old fields, raising the amount we can recover – but
production is still falling at 4.1% p.a. [per annum]."

Dr.
Miller, who prepared annual in-house projections of future oil supply
for BP from 2000 to 2007, refers to this as the "ATM problem" – "more
money, but still limited daily withdrawals." As a consequence:
"Production of conventional liquid oil has been flat since 2008. Growth
in liquid supply since then has been largely of natural gas liquids
[NGL]- ethane, propane, butane, pentane - and oil-sand bitumen."

Dr. Miller is co-editor of a special edition of the prestigious journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, published this month on the future of oil supply. In an introductory paper co-authored with Dr. Steve R. Sorrel, co-director of the Sussex Energy Group
at the University of Sussex in Brighton, they argue that among oil
industry experts "there is a growing consensus that the era of cheap oil
has passed and that we are entering a new and very different phase."
They endorse the conservative conclusions of an extensive earlier study
by the government-funded UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC):

It’s the season to show concern for the less fortunate among us. We should also be concerned about the widening gap between the most fortunate and everyone else.

Although
it’s still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning $648
million in the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million),
the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re born into. Our life
chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of
our parents.

That’s not always been the case. The faith that
anyone could move from rags to riches – with enough guts and gumption,
hard work and nose to the grindstone – was once at the core of the
American Dream.

And equal opportunity was the heart of the
American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually
propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee
civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen
access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed,
raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this
was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.

But for more than
three decades we’ve been going backwards. It’s far more difficult today
for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy
adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.

The
major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder
the climb. America is now more unequal that it’s been for eighty or more
years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all
developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.

Tensions between Bay Area
activists and tech institutions ratcheted up this morning when
protestors attacked a Google bus in West Oakland, smashing the bus’s
rear window while Google employees were inside. Local news organization
KQED reports that Google has confirmed the attack.

One Google employee took to Twitter to post evidence of the encounter. A picture shows protestors standing in front of the bus holding a sign that says, “Fuck Off Google.”

Protestors published a colorful account
of the incident on local forum IndyBay.org: “[A] person appeared from
behind the bus and quickly smashed the whole of the rear window, making
glass rain down on the street. Cold air blew inside the bus and the
blockaders with their banners departed. The kind young man left the bus
and outside someone threw fliers with a smiley face logo and the message
‘disrupt google’ into the air.”

Two blockades of tech company
buses were planned this morning, one in San Francisco and the other in
West Oakland. The San Francisco group was organized by a loose coalition
of housing activists, including representatives from Eviction Free SF,
Our Mission No Eviction, and Just Cause. For the SF protest, roughly 100
people showed up and blocked an Apple bus for 30 minutes.

The spokesperson for the San
Francisco group, Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, claims the two protests were not
connected. “I have no idea who is organizing the West Oakland protest,”
she says. “We just heard a rumor it was happening a few days ago and
thought it was perfect timing since the same pressures are happening on
both sides of the bay.”

Based on the activists’
account themselves, it appears the rowdier West Oakland protest was a
smaller group. The IndyBay.org account said:

Florida couple told to uproot her vegetables, but now she's fighting back

Jon QueallyPublished on Tuesday, December 17, 2013 by Common DreamsIt happened in Quebec, we watched it play out in Orlando,
and now in the town of Miami Shores, Florida a retired architect named
Hermine Ricketts and her husband Tom are fighting city officials who
said they couldn't grow vegetables in their own front yard.

As
she explained to NPR in a radio segment that aired Monday, Ricketts
planted her vegetables in the front yard because it faces south—"that's
where the sun is." But now, even though she gardens "for the food and
for the peace it brings her," city officials told her she had to uproot
the veggies and remove the garden.

There are lots of things planted in Ricketts' front yard: a
pomegranate tree, a blueberry bush, papaya, strawberries, pineapples,
flowers and green plants.

But noticeably absent is anything considered by Miami Shores to be a
vegetable. That's because earlier this year, after tending her garden
for 17 years with nothing from the neighbors but compliments, Ricketts
was ordered to dig up her veggies.

She says she was surprised several months ago when a zoning inspector stopped by."He told me I was not allowed to have vegetables in the front yard," she says.

Though Hermine and Tom fought the order all the way to the town's
zoning board, the board chairman refused the appeal and Ricketts
ultimately complied by removing the offending plants in her front yard.

The battle, however, was not over as the couple tapped the national
advocacy group Institute for Justice who agreed to take on the case.

And Ari Bargill, a lawyer now representing Ricketts as she contests
the city rules, told NPR that the ban against front yard vegetable
gardening is an affront to other guaranteed property rights.

As he explained to NPR, Miami Shores must have a very good reason to
restrict what individuals can do in their own yard, "and that is not the
case with a ban on vegetables."

American workers increased their productivity
over the summer at the fastest pace since 2009, according to new data
released by the Labor Department. Higher productivity is generally
welcomed by analysts as an indicator of strong economic growth, but may
not translate into much benefit for workers.

Though workers produced more per hour over the third quarter of 2013, their hourly wages haven’t quite kept up.
Theoretically, increased productivity means businesses can pay workers
more without triggering inflation. However, this logic has failed to
play out in real life, as wages have stagnated even as worker productivity soared over the past decade. Productivity rose even faster
after the 2008 recession due to massive layoffs that allowed businesses
to reduce their labor costs while remaining workers increased their
output. Workers’ share of the economy, meanwhile, dropped to record lows during this period.

Boosted productivity, then, has largely benefited businesses, not
workers. Businesses’ labor costs dropped in the third quarter,
suggesting little movement in terms of wages or new hiring. Some
companies have touted draconian efficiency schemes to reduce labor
costs, paying employees minimum wage while literally counting the seconds it takes a worker to complete a task. As labor expenses drop, corporate profits are sky-high.

Though productivity has risen, the quality of work has declined. Low-wage, part-time jobs
in the retail and service sectors have made up the bulk of job growth
since the recession. Though these low wages help businesses reduce their
labor costs, taxpayers usually pick up the slack; workers are
increasingly turning to public benefits like food stamps and Medicaid to make ends meet.

Even with low labor costs, many businesses are fighting a minimum
wage increase that could lessen the persistent gap between productivity
and compensation. Studies show that the minimum wage, if it had kept
pace with productivity gains over the past 30 years, would have been $21.72 last year — a far cry from President Obama’s recent proposal of $10.

A political agenda for the precarious class.

In our January 2014 issue, In These Times explores how life
has become increasingly precarious for the many Americans who lack job
security—a trend that is the predictable result of the ongoing
disempowerment of the American worker.

But it is not only the corporate system that is impoverishing our
citizens. Millions of Americans face a precarious financial future,
thanks to the democratic institutions that are meant to represent them.
Seniors who rely on Social Security are beset by D.C. budget-cutters
bent on reducing cost-of-living increases. The poor go hungry in the
wake of congressional cuts to food stamps. Retirees in the public sector
face uncertain futures as state and local governments turn away from
their pension obligations.

It’s not that the United States, one of the richest countries on earth,
lacks the resources to remedy the situation. The problem is how our
nation’s immense wealth is distributed—or, more accurately, how it is
maldistributed to the very few. The figures are stark: In 2010, the
richest 1 percent of Americans owned 35 percent
of the nation’s privately held wealth, and the next 19 percent owned 54
percent. The remaining 80 percent of Americans held only 11 percent of
the wealth.

In a speech on Dec. 4, 2013, President Obama decried
“an economy that’s become profoundly unequal” with the end result being
that “a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288 times higher
than the typical family.”

There are remedies. National and state laws mandating more progressive
taxation could transfer some of the wealth held by the top 1 percent
into public coffers, where it could be allocated to alleviate the
precarious existence of Americans.

New Mexico becomes the 17th state to enact marriage equality, with a unanimous decision by the state's highest court.

BY Sunnivie BrydumDecember 19 2013

In a landmark decision, the New Mexico Supreme Court
declared that marriage rights must be extended to same-sex couples
throughout the state.

The
state's highest court unanimously ruled that denying committed same-sex
couples the right to marry violated the Equal Protection clause of the
New Mexico constitution.

"We
hold that the State of New Mexico is constitutionally required to allow
same-gender couples to marry and must extend to them the rights,
protections, and responsibilities that derive from civil marriage under
New Mexico law," reads the ruling.

The
court rejected the argument presented by marriage equality opponents
that the state had a legitimate governmental interest in "responsible
procreation and childrearing," declaring that supposed interest "is not
reflected in the history of the development of New Mexico's marriage
laws. Procreation has never been a condition of marriage under New
Mexico law, as evidenced by the fact that the aged, the infertile, and
those who choose not to have children are not precluded from marrying.
In addition, New Mexico law recognizes the right of same-gender couples
to raise children."

The
unanimous decision orders all county clerks in the state to issue
marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and also confirms the legal
validity of the unions of same-sex couples who married in New Mexico
prior to today's decision, after officials in several counties began
issuing marriage licenses to them.

“This
truly is a historic and joyful day for New Mexico, said Laura Schauer
Ives, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New
Mexico, one of the groups that represented the six same-sex couples in
the case before the court, along with the national ACLU and the National
Center for Lesbian Rights. “As a state, we have always strived to treat
all families with dignity and respect, and today’s decision allowing
loving, committed same sex couples to marry continues that tradition.
The more than 1,000 same-sex couples who have already married in New
Mexico can now rest certain knowing their marriages will be recognized
and respected by our state.”

Added
NCLR legal director Shannon Minter: “Today’s decision by the New
Mexico Supreme Court is a powerful affirmation that same-sex couples are
equal members of New Mexico’s diverse culture and must be given the
same legal protections and respect as other families. With this ruling,
New Mexico joins 16 other states, the District of Columbia, and at least
eight Native American tribes that permit same-sex couples to marry.
This is an important day, not only for New Mexico, but for the entire
country.”

Consumer Reports shines a sickening light on America's most popular meat.

A new Consumer Reports study finds a disturbingly high statistic: 97%
of the chicken breasts CR tested were found to harbor bacteria that
could make you sick. That's just three percent shy of all the chicken.

The report analyzed more than 300 raw chicken breasts purchased at
stores across the U.S., and found potentially harmful bacteria lurking
in almost all of the it. The staggering statistic also included organic
brands, so foodies beware: a revised label and trendy buzzword does not a
safe poultry make. The numbers came to light during an intensive
investigation after the October news of a national salmonella outbreak
linked to three Foster Farms chicken plants, which soon yielded
troubling results for more than just the one company’s chicken product.
In the case of the Foster Farms outbreak, nearly 390 people were
infected, with 40% of them hospitalized in critical condition—double the
percentage historically linked to salmonella outbreaks.

The news marks a particularly dark turn in what is widely considered
America’s most popular meat. Consumer Reports estimates that Americans
buy an average of 83 pounds of chicken per capita annually. Each year,
nearly 2 million Americans fight antibiotic-resistant infection, with
23,000 succumbing to the virus. As a result, many are calling for the
Food and Drug Administration to release new guidelines addressing
antibiotic overuse in livestock.

The Consumer Reports test found bacteria in chicken purchased in
markets in 26 states across the country. Additionally, the report found
that almost none of the major brands were free of bacteria, more than
half were tainted with fecal contaminants, about half of the samples
tested positive for at least one multi-drug-resistant bacterium, and of
the 65% of samples that tested positive for E. coli, nearly 18% featured
particularly vicious strands of the disease that are known to heighten
the probability of urinary-tract infection substantially higher.

While cooking chicken at specific temperatures does tend to kill
bacteria if heat reaches at least 165 degrees fahrenheit, the
temperature may not be enough to eliminate risk of exposure, as bugs and
disease may linger elsewhere on kitchen surfaces, faucets and utensils.
Even worse, contaminated chicken can affect people not buying chicken
when it lingers on shopping carts at the grocery stores.Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/food/new-study-97-all-chicken-breasts-contain-harmful-bacteria

JPMorgan's CEO just violated a federal statute carrying a prison sentence. But will the punishment fit the crime?

The crowd waited impatiently outside 270 Park Avenue, corporate
headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. Photographers readied their cameras.
Then, the murmuring grew into a low roar. There was CEO Jamie Dimon,
accompanied by two FBI agents. His hands were tied behind his back, held
together by handcuffs. As flashbulbs popped, the agents guided Dimon
into an awaiting vehicle, and drove off to take him into police custody.

Christmas miracle? It doesn’t have to be. Even putting aside the rap sheet
of crimes committed by JPMorgan Chase over the past several years for
which its CEO can be said to be ultimately responsible, just a week ago,
Jamie Dimon explicitly violated a federal statute that carries a prison
sentence. That he’s a free man today, with no fear of prosecution,
doesn’t only speak to our two-tiered system of justice in America. It
should color our perceptions of new rules and regulations that
supposedly “get tough” on the financial industry, as we recognize that
any law is only as strong as the individuals who enforce them.

The law in question that Jamie Dimon violated, by his own admission, can be found in Section 906 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
In the aftermath of the 2001 financial crisis, when corporations like
Enron and WorldCom melted down in accounting scandals, Congress passed
and George W. Bush signed Sarbanes-Oxley, meant to reform corporate
accounting and protect investors through additional disclosures.

Section
906 forces corporate CEOs and CFOs (chief financial officers) to add a
written certification to every periodic financial statement filed with
the Securities and Exchange Commission. In this certification, the CEO
and CFO must personally attest that the documents submitted to the SEC
are accurate, as well as that the corporation has adequate internal
controls. That phrase “internal controls” has a very specific meaning,
covering the accuracy of all financial reporting, proper risk
management, and compliance with all applicable regulations. Under
Section 906, if the CEO or CFO knowingly or willfully make false
certifications – i.e., if they know the SEC filing contains inaccurate
information, or that the company’s internal controls are inadequate –
they face fines of up to $5 million, and imprisonment of up to 20 years.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson